Thinking with Deleuze

478 Pages·2019·2.273 MB·English

by  Ronald Bogue

Thinking with Deleuze

Thinking with Deleuze
Ronald Bogue
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© Ronald Bogue, 2019
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xx
Abbreviations xxii
I. Thinking Otherwise
1. The Master Apprentice 1
II. The Possible and the People to Come
2. To Choose to Choose – To Believe in This World 25
3. Speranza, Island of the Possible 44
4. The Art of the Possible 70
5. Deleuze and Guattari and the Future of Politics:
Science Fiction, Protocols and the People to Come 87
6. Protocols of Experience and the Experimental Novel 111
III. Music and Philosophy
7. The New Harmony 127
8. Deleuze, Mann and Modernism: Musical Becoming in
Doctor Faustus 145
9. Scoring the Rhizome: Bussotti’s Musical Diagram 168
vi Thinking with Deleuze
IV. Literature and Philosophy
10. Deleuze, Guattari and the Kafka–Kleist Connection:
Towards a Literature of War 193
11. On the Superiority of Chinese-American Literature 226
12. Theatrum Philosophicum Asiaticum 248
V. Sight, Sound and Language
13. The Landscape of Sensation 267
14. Deleuze and Roxy: The Time of the Intolerable and
Godard’s Adieu au langage 284
15. Visions and Auditions: The Image in the Late Thought
of Deleuze 304
VI. Nature
16. A Thousand Ecologies 327
17. Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 347
18. The Companion Cyborg: Technics and Domestication 372
19. Vitalism and the Force That Is But Does Not Act:
Ruyer, Leibniz and Deleuze 391
20. Plateau Three: Who the Earth Thinks It Is 413
Bibliography 436
Index 450
preface vii
Preface
The essays of this collection represent a decade-long attempt to
think with Deleuze, both alongside him and through him, follow-
ing diverse lines of his thought and deploying certain concepts
to extend that thought into areas he did not explore. Each essay
offers a separate point of entry into Deleuze’s thought, but all focus
ultimately on Deleuze’s effort to ‘think otherwise’ and thereby
invent possibilities for life, in the hope that such possibilities
eventuate in a people to come and a new earth.
In a broad sense, the present effort to think with Deleuze is a
continuation of my work since 2004. When my first book, Deleuze
and Guattari, appeared in 1989, there was very little on Deleuze
available in English. The book was commissioned as a contribu-
tion to the series Critics of the Twentieth Century, and hence
it provided analyses of Deleuze’s literary studies of Proust and
Sacher-Masoch and Deleuze and Guattari’s volume on Kafka. But
the absence of secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari and
their marginal status in what was then referred to as critical theory
meant that any consideration of Deleuze and Guattari as literary
critics would have to be situated within a broad introduction to
their thought in general – and, in fact, well over two-thirds of
the book was devoted to that purpose. The publisher’s page limit,
however, precluded a consideration of the full Deleuzian corpus,
and I chose to trace the outlines of Deleuze’s thought by discussing
only Nietzsche and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of
Sense, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.
Upon completing that project, I saw the need for a more
viii Thinking with Deleuze
comprehensive exposition of Deleuze’s thought as well as a
thorough engagement with his approach to the arts as a whole.
I therefore embarked on an examination of Deleuze’s writings
on literature, cinema, music and art, with the goal of providing
discussions of each art sufficiently sophisticated to address the
concerns of students and practitioners of the art in question, yet
accessible enough to be understood by those engaged in other
artistic fields and by philosophers interested in Deleuze’s aesthetics
and its relationship to his thought in general. This effort resulted
in a 2003 trilogy on Deleuze and the arts: Deleuze on Literature,
Deleuze on Cinema and Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts.
Although I conceived of this trilogy as an exercise in ‘reading
along with’ Deleuze, the emphasis was more on ‘reading’ than
‘along with’, in that most of my attention was directed towards
an explication of Deleuze’s difficult texts and an exposition of the
broad tenets of his aesthetics. In this sense, the trilogy was largely
a continuation of my initial project of offering an introduction to
Deleuze for the uninitiated. It was only in the essays of Deleuze’s
Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (2004) and Deleuze’s Way: Essays in
Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (2007) that I adopted as a primary
goal that of thinking with Deleuze – untangling strands of motifs
enmeshed in diverse arguments and using Deleuzian concepts
to test their viability in the analysis of subjects Deleuze did not
address, such as No¯ drama and death metal music. Decisive in
these efforts was my encounter with the concept of fabulation, a
minor theme in Deleuze’s work that had gone largely unnoticed by
commentators. This encounter led me to develop an approach to
narrative in terms of fabulation and to argue for its use in reading
modern fiction. In Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
(2010), I detailed the features of such Deleuzian fabulation and
utilised them in extended analyses of five contemporary novels.
Central to the concept of fabulation is the goal of inventing a
people to come. In the essays presented in this volume, I continue
to meditate on the idea of inventing a people to come and all that
such invention entails. What I have added to this meditation is
a consideration of Deleuze and Guattari’s call for the creation
of a new earth. The term ‘new earth’ (‘terre nouvelle’ or ‘nou-
velle terre’) occurs eight times in Anti-Oedipus, in each case as
preface ix
an indicator that the schizo’s deterritorialisation discloses a new,
deterritorialised ‘terre’. (The English translation masks this repe-
tition, rendering ‘nouvelle terre’ or ‘terre nouvelle’ as ‘new earth’
[AO 131, 299, 321], ‘new land’ [AO 318, 322] and ‘new world’
[AO 322].) In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to
a ‘nouvelle terre’ five times (rendered as ‘new earth’ [ATP 423,
510] and ‘new land’ [ATP 149, 472, 509]), and they also speak
of a ‘people to come’ (‘peuple à venir’) – a phrase that does not
occur in Anti-Oedipus – three times (twice on page 345, translated
first as ‘people yet to come’ and then as ‘people to come’, once on
page 467). But it is only in What is Philosophy? that the notions
of a new earth and a people to come are brought together. In the
concluding paragraph of What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari
state that what unites philosophy, the sciences and the arts is
the creation of a ‘people to come’ (WP 218), but in Chapter 4,
‘Geophilosophy’, they connect that effort to the ‘creation of a
future new earth’ (‘la création d’une nouvelle terre à venir’) (WP
88). Philosophy must ‘summon forth a new earth, a new people’
(WP 99). It must induce absolute deterritorialisation ‘even to the
point where this calls for a new earth, a new people’ (WP 101).
The creation of concepts ‘in itself calls for a future form, for a new
earth and people that do not yet exist’ (WP 108), for ‘the people
to come and the new earth’ (WP 109).
Adding a call for a new earth to a call for a new people might
seem a mere rhetorical flourish, a means of emphasising the all-
encompassing transformations attendant on a truly revolutionary
philosophy. In such case, it would make no difference whether
‘terre’ were translated as ‘earth’, ‘world’ or ‘land’. But as Deleuze
and Guattari suggest in A Thousand Plateaus, the concept of a
new earth is inseparable from their ontology, which is that of a
perpetually self-organising, disorganising and reorganising, meta-
morphic ‘chaosmos’. In Plateau Three, ‘The Geology of Morals’,
they present the earth both as the locus of strata encompassing the
physico-chemical, organic and anthropic (or ‘alloplastic’) domains
of an anorganic life, and as ‘the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the
giant Molecule [. . .] a body without organs’ (ATP 40). In Plateau
Eleven, ‘The Refrain’, they elaborate on the ethological ramifi-
cations of Plateau Three’s ontology of strata, and in Plateau Ten,
x Thinking with Deleuze
‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible
. . .’, they detail processes of metamorphosis that traverse all the
strata of the natural world. Hence, the call for a new earth is
more than a vague utopian slogan. Rather, it is an invocation of
absolute deterritorialisation as a cosmic force that plays through
rocks, plants, animals and humans. ‘We could say that the earth,
as deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D [deterritori-
alisation]. To the point that D can be called the creator of the
earth – of a new earth, a universe, not just a reterritorialization’
(ATP 509; trans. modified). Deterritorialisation is relative when
it induces stratification, but it is absolute when it ‘brings about the
creation of a new earth, in other words, when it connects lines of
flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line, or draws a
plane of consistency’ (ATP 510).
A central concern of the essays in this volume, then, is to
connect this view of nature to the political goal of inventing a
people to come and to situate the arts in relation to the project
of creating a new earth and a new people. The key, I argue here,
is to ‘think otherwise’, and thereby to open possibilities for new
modes of existence, to adopt ‘protocols of experience’ as guides
for experimentation in politics and the arts, and to embrace a
‘chaosmopolitanism’, in which a viable collectivity invents new
ways of living in resonance with the chaosmos of nature.
Since the publication of my first book, the secondary literature
on Deleuze has increased dramatically, especially over the last
decade. Interest in Deleuze and Guattari has spread well beyond
the confines of Europe, North America and Australia, with
extremely rich uses of their thought being developed in East and
South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. That
expansion is represented in a very small way in this collection by
the essay on Chinese-American literature (Chapter 11), delivered
at the first Deleuze conference held in the People’s Republic of
China (Henan University, 2012), and the study of Deleuze and
Asian drama (Chapter 12), presented at the First International
Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference in Taiwan (2013). In both
cases, my effort was to redress the asymmetry so often evident
in East–West engagements with philosophy and the arts, in
which Asian scholars devote serious study to Western texts while